ERIH PLUS

ERIH PLUS — three years at the Norwegian Centre for Research Data

Bergen/2017-12-20

In 2014, the responsibility for the maintenance and operation of
the European Science Foundation's reference index for scholarly
journals, ERIH, was transferred to the NSD — Norwegian Centre for
Research Data. ERIH was founded as a measure to render visible
scholarly journals in the humanities. However, after NSD resumed the
responsibility for the reference index on July 9, 2014, it was named
ERIH PLUS as it included also scholarly journals from the social
sciences.

July 9, 2017 marked ERIH PLUS' three year anniversary here at NSD
in Bergen, Norway. To celebrate this anniversary, the ERIH PLUS Team
wishes to share some of the developments made over the three year
period.

After NSD became responsible for the index, ERIH PLUS opened for
submissions for inclusion of new journals. To be included, scientific
journals in the humanities and social sciences must meet the benchmark
developed jointly by NSD and EFS (see
criteria for inclusion). The
number of submissions of new journals per month has been quite
consistent from October, 2014, until now. The average of submissions
the last seven months has been 192 journals which is a slight increase
compared to an average of 185 and 171 journals per months during the
same period in 2016 and 2015, respectively.

Moreover, in 2015, 2.053 new journals were submitted to the
index, and in 2016 as many as 2.226 journals were registered as new
submissions. From January to July of this year, 1.345 journals (and
counting) have been newly registered submissions. The ERIH PLUS Team
continues to receive submissions from scholars, journal editors,
librarians and other members of scholarly association. At the moment
there are about 70 journals waiting to be processed.

Furthermore, as regards the usage of the ERIH PLUS, the number of
searches for journals on the website of the database has been varying
to some degree through the months from opening the service in July 2014
until January of 2017. Here the numbers have varied from 10.000–33.000
per month. The figure below demonstrates trend lines for this three
year period. While the figure shows prominent variations from month to
month, yet the average number of searches conducted demonstrates that
the interest is consistently high.

The newest and most prominent development made in the ERIH PLUS
reference index during the three year period has been the ERIH PLUS
revision process. Between 2015 and 2017 all journals transferred from
ERIH to ERIH PLUS were revised against the new ERIH PLUS criteria. The
aim of the revision has been to ensure that all indexed journals follow
the ERIH PLUS standard. 5.637 journals were transferred from ERIH to
ERIH PLUS. During the revision process, the ERIH PLUS Team collected
data for all the journals in order to make this information transparent
for the users of the index, and to ensure that the information in ERIH
PLUS is up to date. Of the ERIH journals that were revised against the
new ERIH PLUS criteria, 2.987 were given ERIH PLUS approval. The
remaining 2.686 journals were not given the new approval, and were
therefore excluded from the database. However, the ERIH PLUS Team has
maintained records of all ERIH journals in a separate and unofficial
list should the editors of journals not given the new approval wish to
apply for/request a re-evaluation. The figure below demonstrates the
number of revisions carried out on a monthly basis between the years
2015 to 2017.

We are pleased to see that through the three years ERIH PLUS has
been located at NSD, the interest in the reference index has remained
consistently high, both in terms of new journal submissions and
searches for journals in the database. Furthermore, we are happy to
celebrate ERIH PLUS' three year anniversary by having finalized the
revision of all ERIH journals - a process that has lasted for two
years. Finally, we hope you find this newsletter interesting, and we
encourage all our users, partners and other interested parties to look
out for future updates and news as we intermittently will continue to
update the ERIH PLUS website and Facebook page with statistics and
facts regarding ERIH PLUS.